Flexible humanoid robot with $16,000 price tag ready for mass production

A robotics company is getting ready to launch a series of humanoid robots that can cook breakfast and complete other daily tasks for their owner, with a $16,000 price tag.

Before Unitree's G1 humanoid robot, the only humanoid robots capable of performing human-like tasks, have largely been confined to laboratories or factories.

According to New Atlas, the Unitree G1, produced by Chinese company Unitree, is an upgraded version of the previous H1 humanoid robot the company reportedly produced a year ago. It contains an "8-core high-performance CPU," the site reported, and has 23 degrees of freedom, with powered joints on its arms, legs and torso.

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The robot is able to run, walk and jump and can also climb stairs with obstacles, and it has dexterous fingers, three on each hand, that are reportedly able to solder wires and handle delicate objects. The hands can flip frying pans, too.

The robot's head has an LED vision system based on a Livox Mid-360 lidar camera as well as an Intel RealSense D435 depth camera. Those allow the robot to see the world like a human would — in 3D.

In terms of size, the robot is just over 4 feet tall and is able to fold down to become smaller so it can be transported or stored. It's about 77 pounds and has a two-hour 9,000mAh battery pack. It's not lightweight, but it's not incredibly heavy, either.

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The robot is slated to be one of the first-ever capable humanoid robots available to the average consumer, and at a much cheaper price than some other, much less capable bots.

Unitree, before it produced the G1, reportedly became known for what's known as a quadruped robot. It famously sold at $1,600 compared to Boston Dynamics' Spot robot, which carried a price tag of $74,500.

Unsurprisingly, tech mogul Elon Musk is also working on competition for the humanoid robot, the Tesla Optimus Gen 2, claiming that his version will cost "much less than $20,000." Boston Dynamics is also working on a humanoid robot, but the cost is so far still a mystery.

It's not yet clear when G1, Unitree's robot, will be available. The Verge warned that customers shouldn't anticipate the robot immediately acclimating and doing chores when purchased, though. The robot is reportedly designed to learn through imitation and uses the Unitree Robot Unified Large Model (UnifoLM).

The initial appeal of the robot won't be for tasks, either — it will be to conduct robotics research, meaning it might still be quite a while before a robot that can automatically cook and clean hits the market.